Just about every time there is a meta discussion there are people suggesting that upvotes/downvotes are just agree/disagree buttons, or that we should just get rid of them altogether.
It is less common to see a defense of voting, but I think it is desperately needed.
My main thesis is that votes are accurate at conveying information, but that many people do not like the information they convey. I believe most people treat the vote buttons as basically a like/dislike button. Users do not always enjoy learning that their posts are "disliked" or the posts of their own that they like the most aren't always "liked" as much by others. Hiding votes does not remove the underlying sentiment though, it just makes it harder to pick up on, or delays discovery for the writer.
Looking through my own "top" and "bottom" comments I am not surprised or offended by their placement. My "bottom" comments are often my controversial mod decisions, or times when I have decided to defend viewpoints that are unpopular here on TheMotte (like race blindness, or open borders). The most hated "controversial" comments also seem to be ones where I am closing off avenues of discussion rather than opening them up. My top comments are usually me sharing information/perspective on a culture war topic that others might not have. And a few times of me writing good pieces about culture war stuff. I often find it helpful to look at other user's top/bottom comments when I have to do mod related research. Top comments often provide many reasons for exoneration, and bottom comments can highlight patterns of bad behavior. An important thing to note here is that votes are great for comparing comments within a single user's history, but not between users.
The agree/disagree critique
One common critique that I linked to above is that people just use the buttons as shorthand for agree/disagree and that this signalling of agreement or disagreement would lead to favored views being rewarded too much, and unfavored views being chased off.
However, this is a problem with and without voting buttons. At best your are simply delaying this discovery for a few moments before they get flooded with comments that very clearly indicate people disagree with them. I did not need to wait 24 hours to find out that people disagreed with me on race blindness or open borders. It was very quickly obvious from the responses (and I was aware before hand that these views would be controversial).
I also think votes, and especially visible vote scores can be a bit of a pressure valve. There are sometimes people that just feel the need to express in some way "I don't like your post/views". One way for them to do this is to downvote. Another way for them to do this is to leave a short comment to the same effect. Sometimes the comment might even look like they are interested in a discussion. When I am in the position of getting dogpiled for a controversial view I would universally prefer the downvote to a go-no-where comment that basically says "i don't like your post/views". This is also one of the times when I most wish I could see other people's vote scores. I'd prefer responding to what other people consider the "best" version of the counterarguments.
Finally, what is so bad about signalling agreement or disagreement? People have views and opinions, we don't need to fool ourselves on this. I don't think we are tricking anyone by hiding the votes that these disagreements don't exist.
Ending notes:
- I am writing this as a user stating my preferences. There has not been internal mod discussion about changes to voting. Status quo is likely to remain in place.
- It is probably a little rude to go through other people's history for examples an counterexamples to voting. I'm fine with anyone doing that with my profile, but its probably best to not drag other users into this discussion unless someone gives explicit permission.
- The rdrama codebase that the site is based on had more features and granularity around voting, we mostly do not have those features turned on or fully working on this website.
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Notes -
Upvoted.
I was actually expecting more push back on this, maybe people just haven't seen it yet.
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Okay, more seriously, I generally agree. I think it is worth pointing out that like/dislike (as you suggest) is more accurate than agree/disagree (as some suggest)—I, at least, will sometimes upvote comments that I disagree with if I'm in a productive conversation with them, and will fail to upvote comments that I otherwise agree with if it's in some respect bad, including beyond content.
I also agree that it's useful to look at user's most upvoted and downvoted posts, even when not a mod. It helps remind me a little of their own inclinations, should I forget, and highlights good old posts from them.
I'll also do a thing where I upvote what I think of as the good conversation for a thread, and downvote the bad conversations.
If I see someone getting dogpiled I try to read through all the other responses before I write anything, to make sure I'm not being redundant. If I find that others have written what I would have then I just upvote them and move on.
It just seems like such a useful tool, but a lot of people tend to dislike it.
Oh, I also definitely do some affirmative action in the form of "normally I wouldn't upvote this, but you've already been downvoted plenty, it's good enough, and I don't want you to think everyone hates you."
My only complaint about hiding scores for 24 hours is that it makes doing this much harder and less useful. I don't want to upvote a mediocre comment on the mere guess that people are probably piling on downvotes-for-disagreement, even if I'm pretty accurate with those guesses.
You can get some information as to the current net total by going to their profile (assuming history's not hidden), and sorting by top or bottom, time restricting as necessary. For example, my "upvoted" comment at the start of this thread must currently be at 2, since it appears after the 3s and before the other 2s, and they're sorted secondarily by time. That doesn't say how it breaks down, of course, though.
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